On the Word "Laowai"

-

Pod link

Hi, you've made it to the Stuck in the Middle Kingdom With You podcast, a story of teaching English in China peppered with tales from Chinese history and culture. This is a preface of sorts. 

Laowai: rude and offensive or friendly or neutral? I'll spell it out here, 'cos this word is going to come up a few times.

In this episode, we also mention the foreign tutors of China's last emperor and empress. Now that's a job! Shame that it was under such doomed circumstances.

Reginald Johnston and Isabel Ingram with Empress Wanrong

Empress Wanrong The Forbidden City and the Odyssey of Its Treasuresa Photographic
Puyi and Wanrong, China's last imperial couple








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stuck in the Middle Kingdom with You: a podcast about China

-
Image
This podcast tells the story of a year of an English teacher in China, working in an international school in Changshu, Jiangsu. It's also full of history and culture. We'll go back to the imperial days, the revolutionary days, the days of triumph and the days of humiliation. Mostly though, it's modern China that I'll focus on, as it is the most relevant to understanding China now. China is super fascinating, and it's also probably the most important country in the world to understand right now, so this is my contribution to that. It's not a chronological history; instead, it kind of matches up to the things that were occuring in my roller-coaster of a year living in Changshu. I've changed the names of the people I that I met when I was in China, except Jess of course. You'll meet Jess later. She's awesome. The podcast is on whichever podcatcher you use. It can be streamed here . If you prefer to go through YouTube, it's also here .
Read more

Open Class

-
 ESL in China is partly about teaching English, but largely about having fun and playing games. Schools are often businesses, and the customers are parents. Make those kids happy. If they don't learn much English, who cares? The grades can be faked anyway. So in this episode here are a few games I invented in school, usually without much planning (which is probably self-evident). Fun times had by all!
Read more